Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
More stuff can be found at gerikson.tumblr.com.
This category contains capsule reviews of books I've read
Part near-future thriller set in yakusa Japan and Sarf London, part SF set in far-far-far-future Earth, this is a hard book to summarize. The thriller part dominates, and seems to be set 15 years in the future mostly so our hero can have some bad memories from Iraq in his youth. The SF element nearly makes sense, but it’s not an SF novel for beginners.
I’ve read one other novel by Grimwood, Pashazade. This is similar, but at the same time almost completely different. Recommended.
A “last man on earth” story set in a Los Angeles beset by vampires. Very much a Fifties novel. Reading this after World War Z was a bit unfair, the latter is a much better story.
Subtitled “An Oral History of the Zombie War, this is a fictional account of the war against the plague of the undead that’s due to engulf us in about 4 years.
Riveting and horrific.
Update 2008-05-08: John Walker has a more extensive review.
A superlative noir near-future SF thriller. I haven’t enjoyed a book like this for a long time. Highly recommended.
More a novella than a full novel. Starts with a bunch of kids stuck in a VR education simulation but the near-future high-school drama soon morphs into something much darker.
Spook Country got some negative reviews, and even though I’d been looking forward to it a long time (Gibson is one of my “read-anything” authors) I decided to wait a bit before buying it. I snatched it up at the library and enjoyed it.
A few people have remarked that Gibson’s stories are pretty shallow and uninteresting, but the point his novels is not the plot, it’s his descriptions of places, people and things. The plot is a meta-MacGuffin that serves the purpose of getting the protagonists to new places where they can fondle shiny new things. These are descriped in the trademark Gibson style.
This book is more of the same. Read it if you like Gibson, skip it if you don’t.
A fun satire but pretty poor SF. I think the fragmented societies of Ken MacLeod (Star Fraction) and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash) are more likely than this future ruled by giant corporations. The government is privatised as there are no taxes. The dirty secret is that without taxes, a huge chunk of “private” enterprise will go bust: military, parts agriculture. Big Capitalism is as addicted to the state as “welfare” recipients.
I was really looking forward to this book, but can’t help but being disappointed. MacLeod’s first foray into techno-thriller territory starts out well. It’s a chilling portrayal of a paranoid post-9/11 Britain. But after a while you recognise the backstory, it’s the same setup as in the Fall Revolution series, with bits from Engines of Light and even Newton’s Wake thrown in. In the end it gets really SF-y, and not in a good way.
In short, I’ve read better MacLeod novels.
I really enjoyed this book. Raban buys a boat and circumnavigates England, Scotland and Wales. The book is written in the early 80s, so the Falklands War, the miners strike and the beginning of the Thatcher era are observed from a position out at sea.
This is a view of an England (for Raban touches mostly in England, and the Isle of Man) in transition, lost in the change between manufacturing and fishing and the new “service economy” and tourism.
It’s a wise, compassionate book, mixing travel writing and memoir. I’ll definitely try to read more by Raban in the future.
This is simply wonderful book. Part mountain climbing memoir, part cultural history that charts the growing Western fascination for mountains.
A centrepiece is a fascinating account of George Mallory’s obsession with Mount Everest. The chapters are a culmination of the preceding book, showing how the changing perceptions of mountains formed Mallory, and how his death in turn shaped those perceptions.
Highly recommended.
What it says on the tin. All the classic stories.
It’s a pity Conan Doyle didn’t manage to keep Holmes dead after the first collection of stories, because the quality went down quite a bit the more he wrote.
A juvenile novel set in the Discworld universe.
Snagged it from the local library. Pratchett is always entertaining.
A layman’s history of the great plague epidemic in 1348. The first chapters are very interesting. The middle of the book bogs down in a detailed history of the plague’s progress through England. It’s relieved by a chapter about the impact on a fictional village.
The book is from 1969, I bought it some years ago and re-read it now, inspired by a radio show I heard about the impact of the Black Death on the recruitment of clerics to the Catholic church.
An entertaining fantasy in which dragons are used as military vehicles in early nineteenth century Europe. Implausibly, everything else (the UK, Napoleonic France, sailing navies) is unchanged. This seems pretty unlikely as according to the backstory, dragons had been used in war since the Crusades. I’m thinking that if dragons existed alongside humans they’d fundamentally change human society, especially since they have intelligence on par with humans.
However, this means that Novik can write a mix of Austen, Patrick O’Brian, and probably oodles of dragon fantasies which seems to be a distinct subgenre of mainstream fantasy. It’s a good job, and an cracking read.
I must confess I read this in one sitting, staying up until 5:30 in the morning to see how it ended. It’s a satisfying end to a long story, anf although most lose ends were tied there were a lot left dangling.
Now I can venture onto the Interwebs free of the fear of spoilers.
This book could almost be called realist fantasy. It’s a world that’s very like the European Middle ages, with none of the nasty bits edited out. There’s blood, guts, lice, forbidden love between liegemen and ladies, and the oaths and fealties that bind lord and vassal have literally divine sanction. Break them and all Hell breaks loose.
This world is believable in a way that many other fantasy worlds are not. It’s a far cry from Robert Jordan’s plasticky universe, if not in the class of Steven Erikson’s multi-layered mythos.
A bonus: the book is self-contained and not obviously part of a series.
A crew of asteroid miners are ordered to investigate a self propelled moon and are whisked far, far away.
Most of the story is about the personal rivalries between factions of the crew, but there are generous helpings of hard-SF sense-of-wonder too. Some wonderfully disgusting aliens make a cameo appearance near the end.
This was a quick read. Like most of Reynold’s books, it’s not really a very good book by literary standards, but there are lots of nice ideas and images in it.
Another quick read. I’m not sure I think Stross is that great a writer, actually. But he can weave an entertaining tale.
However, a lot of the themes are repurposed from his previous novel Iron Sunrise, and even though the universes are different it still feels like they are too similar.
Hit the SF bookstore in Gamla stan and picked this up today. Read it between 2 o’clock and half an hour ago, thus, a quick read.
Not really as good as Old Man’s War but still entertaining.
Read this while on Easter holiday. Not bad at all.
Awesome book. There so much common sense in here it should be illegal.
The most important lesson to gather from this book is that your employees (if they’re knowledge workers, but who isn’t in this day and age?) are an asset, and not just an expense. In the information age you don’t invest in machines and buildings, you invest in attracting and retaining the best people. Putting these people in offices that are cramped and not conductive to knowledge work is like not taking care of your machines or buildings — you’re effectively destroying capital.
Uneasy blend of SF and fantasy, with some rock-and-roll thrown in. Reads like the basis for a fantasy RPG sometimes.
Religously-tinged SF horror about a race of proto-hominids existing deep beneath the surface of the Earth. A page-turner.
A collection of “weird” tales from the beginning of the twentieth century. Flavours of Saki.
Military SF from Baen Books. Reminiscent of David Weber, the same glorification of weapons and the military and the same right-wing outlook. The characters are not entirely one-dimensional though.
Schlock I’m glad I borrowed from the library and didn’t pay for. Slightly entertaining nonetheless.
A riff on Starship Troopers with some elements of The Forever War. Good writing and great humour. Can’t wait to buy the sequel(s).
A history of the anti-communist movement in forties-fifties USA.
Two novellas from Reynold’s Revelation space universe.
A short history of the World War II battle of Kursk in 1943.
This book felt like Leonard wrote it with one hand tied behind his back. The redeeming feature was the excellent narration by Paul Rudd.
Subtitled A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime, this is a very good book about the modern realities of maritime transport and law enforcement. Langewieshe’s thesis is that the oceans, by their very size, are natural havens for shady types like pirates, unscrupulous shipowners and ineffectual regulators.
He writes about shipwrecks, piracy, and the shipbreaking industry in India and Bangladesh. Central to the book is the sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia, a wound that has not yet healed in Sweden. He shows how most landlubbers will rather indulge in conspiracy theories to explain the accident, instead of accepting that the sea is a very dangerous place, and that shore-based attempts to impose order are inherently doomed to fail.
This audiobook was read by the author, which worked well.
Audiobook.
Palin recounts his travels around the Sahara filming for the BBC. He’s a good author and narrator, and conveys a good picture throughout the book of the country and the people.
Yet another history. This focuses in large part on the global aspects of the war, in addition to trying to explaining the conflict in terms that the combatants understood — the conflict between liberalism and authoritatism. In the author’s view, the war wasn’t fought for meaningless reasons, and he asserts that the later view of it as a senseless carnage is a product of poets and authors writing during the 1920’s.
Boken handlar om Catrine da Costa-fallet från 1984. Utgångspunkten är den mediakampanj som bedrevs kring 2000 för att dom båda läkarna skulle få upprättelse. Men ju mer Borgnäs gräver i fallet desto mer märkliga omständigheter finnar han.
Han är mycket kritisk mot Leif GW Persson som på egen hand bestämt sig att läkarna måste vara oskyldiga. Men enligt Borgnäs pekar många spår, inte bara i Catrine-fallet, mot Obducenten. Persson och Guillou gjorde allt i sin makt att peka polisen åt helt andra håll, med stora konsekvenser för dom oskyldiga som råkade komma i vägen.
A generation starship approaches a system after a 400 year voyage, intent on colonising the asteroid belt and pushing off again. They are shocked to discover the first alien intelligent life encountered during humanity’s 15,000-year expansion.
A nicely done novel, especially the fact that the aliens are more “human” (closer to us) than our putative descendants. Also a good treatment of the generation ship problem: how do you ensure a stable population over a voyage spanning centuries? The answer: genetic engineering and late-stage capitalism, with the “founders” investing in the ventures of the colonising “ship generation”.
A blend of the spy thriller with H.P. Lovecraft, mixed with IT life satire.
Nice blend of science fiction and politics from the master himself.
I actually finished this last week, but I’ve been planning a longish review since before the weekend. Now I’m actually writing I can’t say much other than that this is a really good book if you like cyberpunk flavoured noir — and who doesn’t?
Here’s my review of Altered Carbon. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the second book in the trilogy, Broken Angels, soon.
This is the latest instalment in Erikson’s epic, The Malazan Book of the Fallen. This dense work benefits from an incremental approach where you read and re-read the previous books over and over again to try to catch all the details and nuances. Luckily, the books are so well-written that this is not a chore at all.
The Malazan universe is exceedingly complex, with new gods, forms of magic, and undead pre-humanoid species turning up every few books. Sometimes they have the appearance of dei ex machinae, but it doesn’t matter that much.
This book is the sixth in a ten-part series, I’m sure Erikson will be able to keep things up for the concluding four. Until then I’ll re-read Memories of Ice again.
I finished three books this long weekend, capsule reviews follow.
Apparently 2 novels, The Knight and The Wizard, I read this tome in trade paperback and got a sore back for my pains. Only thing wrong with this book, which is vintage Wolfe. Echoes of the Torturer series, this is in a classic fairytale setting with knights and princesses and elfs, but with a few twists. Our hero grows to be a man in a night, battles giants and dragons, dies and goes to Valhalla, returns to claim his queen. Great stuff.
What it says on the tin. Worried about the plague of undead coming to eat your flesh? This book tells you what to do before, during, and after an outbreak of zombies in your neighborhood. Also contains tips for surviving the apocalypse of an Earth dominated by the living dead.
Pratchett takes on the military and adds a twist to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” meme.
Subtitled “A Codemaker’s War, 1941—1945”, a memoir of work in the SOE (Special Operations Executive) during World War II. Well worth the read.
The title refers to the author’s offer to his superiors: either code pages printed on hard-to-obtain silk were issued to agents, or they would have to use their cyanide tablets.
A book about the political background of the Restoration. Mostly interesting for the origin of the Whig and Tory parties in British politics.
This is a re-read. Not as good as the earlier novels but Gibson is still a master of his own kind of tech-distilled noir style.
A Discworld novel dealing with the evils of organised religion. Readable, but I’ve read funnier stuff.
A nice reinvention of the cyberpunk genre, set in alternate-future Ottoman Alexandria.
[…] Things only started to unravel in the sixth [year] when I decided there was nothing wrong with my school that couldn’t be cured with a sub-machine gun and unlimited ammunition […]
A fantasy novel about a ne’er-do-well musician in San Fransisco who’s life is turned upside down when he’s attacked by a being from the parallell universe of Faerie. Naturally his destiny is much grander than he thought…
Well written like all William’s books. The beginning is near social-realism — our hero loses his unborn child in a miscarriage, his girlfriend, and his mother to cancer in the first few chapters. This sets the tone for the rest of the book and removes any inconvenient characters that may mess up the path of destiny.
A classic public library book: something you’re delighted to find in the shelves but won’t pay for in the store.
This is the first audiobook I’ve listened to, and was a really good one. Stephen Fry’s narration is brilliant, lending colour and excitement to a very long, episodic book. What the scriptwriters of the film adaptation will do to ensure that the film isn’t over four hours long, I don’t know.
A re-read.
The first Reynolds novel I read, but not the best. The parts on the generation starship are well-written though, but the steampunk ambience in Chasm City isn’t as interesting.
The fourth book in the Malazan series.
The second part of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series.
This book rests on a central premise, that an alternate 1959 Earth has been preserved like a fly in amber by some all-powerful aliens. In the far future, two warring factions of humanity stumble upon it and use the artifacts there to complement the forgotten history of the Nanocaust.
Reynolds skilfully weaves together “hard” S-F with a Simenon-like detective story. But if you ignore the technical mastery and the skillful plotting, the story is basically absurd. But it’s an enjoyable read nonetheless. I stayed up until one in the morning yesterday to finish it.
This is a re-read.
It’s hard to describe what’s so good with Erikson’s writing and universe. Perhaps it’s the gnarly texture of the world,the pervasiveness of magic accessible to most people, the sweat, the blood, the many-layered mythologies…
I was lucky to get Deadhouse Gates and House of Chains at the library, I’ll be re-reading them as soon as I finish with Century Rain.
Update 2006-06-12: re-read it again.
A new installment in the Malazan series, this moves the action to a wholly different part of the world? universe? — it’s not clear. It’s been a while since I read the preceding book, and my grasp of all the different races, gods, and demons is a bit shaky, but I’m pretty sure we haven’t encountered the Tiste Edur in detail before.
They are an agricultural people about to be conquered by the rapacious Letherii, whose society is like a caricature of our own Western society. But all is not as it seems, as the closest this series has to a figure of pure evil, the Fallen God, has other plans…
A good read as usual with Erikson.
Feh. There should be a warning printed on this 1,144 page book:
This is the first book in a series
Dunno if I’ll buy the sequel. Hamilton is a capable wordsmith, and the plot moves along at a respectable clip. But the surface is a bit too polished, the characters a bit too much like cardboard.
This is the type of book that publicists call “epic” that others might less charitably describe as “bloated.” […] An editorial pruning might have put this prospective doorstop on more people’s “to read” lists.
Today, this kind of book would be called a mashup.
A little bagatell, as we say in Sweden.
An S-F novel not set in Bank’s Culture universe. Has good sense-of-wonder factors, but the characters seem a bit cardboard-like for Banks.
Well, the trilogy is done. It was never boring, but it takes a good writer to keep the reader hooked for three thousand pages. Stephenson does a good but not stellar job.
Update: the books are frequently funny, but not often laugh-out-loud funny. The following passage made me lol though. The hero, Daniel Waterhouse, and sir Isaac Newton are meeting with an informer in the pub of the Newgate prison, called the Black Dogg:
The Black Dogg was not the sort of tavern that contained a great deal of furniture — patrons either stood, or lay on the floor. There was a bar, of course, in the literal sense of a bulwark erected between the prisoners and the gin. This was now a palisade of burning tapers. […]
Well, that was a hard slog. I’ll be reading The System of the World next, because The Confusion picked up considerably two-thirds of the way through, and also I’ve already payed for it. But I can’t say the trilogy is Stephenson’s best effort.
Yawn, yet another HP adventure. This was better plotted than the last, but still not really a good book.
A “hard fantasy” novel, containing some nice ideas (really only one idea, but the ramifications are well thought out). Well written, if a bit confusing at times. As it’s fantasy, of course this is just the first novel in a series… sigh. I’ll perhaps pick up the next book when it arrives in paperback.
A mix between The Secret History and (I guess, I haven’t read it) The Da Vinci Code. Not bad at all.
These are the books I read during my two weeks vacation on the west coast of Sweden.
Four novels by Patrick O’Brian:
In my opinion, The Thirteen-Gun Salute is the last really good Aubrey-Maturin novel.
Based on Waugh’s own experiences in World War 2, this is a funny — and grim — trilogy about the death of Honour and the birth of the base modern age.
Whew! I just completed an extended trip down memory lane. I last read them in my early teens, but still remember nearly all the plots.
Swallows and Amazons: the first book.
Swallowdale: the arch-nemesis of the Amazons, the Great Aunt, makes her first appearance.
Peter Duck: my battered Puffin paperback was liberated from the school library in Kuala Lumpur. It’s marked
HIGHGATE HILL PRIMARY SCHOOL
HQ KUALA LUMPUR GARRISON
c/o G.P.O. KUALA LUMPUR
The last date is 16.10.75. As we didn’t move to KL until 1977, I’m guessing this book was sold out or given away.
Winter Holiday: the D’s, Dick and Dorothea, make their appearance.
Coot Club: a favourite.
Pigeon Post: a bit different from what I remember. I focused a lot more on Dick back then, guess it was identification with him.
We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea: a great book.
Secret Water. Not one of my favourites.
The Big Six: classic juvenile detective story
Missee Lee: a swashbuckling tale involving a female pirate chief with a passion for Latin. Our heroes are forced to endure that fate worse than death: lessons in the holidays. The shiftless youngest, Roger, unexpectedly shines as a Latin scholar. Mildly racist in a 30s kind of way.
The Picts and the Martyrs: an interesting book. The premise is that in order to be nice to Mrs. Blackett, the D’s have to be “naughty” and live in the woods, cooking their own food and generally having a typical S&A-type adventure. This is because the dreaded Great Aunt would blow up if she found them living with the Amazons. Interesting juxtaposition of morals here.
Great Nothern?: early eco-friendly children’s literature. The setting is in the Scottish Highlands, which lends it another flavour than the Lake District or the Broads. I thought I likes this book better than I actually did.
I’m taking a break from O’Brian for a while. This book marks the end of my collection of WW Norton paperbacks, which are larger than the editions from Harper Collins that follow. Someday I can afford to replace them all with hardcovers.
Another one of my favourites within the series.
Here we first make our acquaintance with Andrew Wray, who will succeed Admiral Harte as Jack and Stephen’s bête noir in the coming novels.
Fourth book in the series. In my memory, rather drab (maybe because it’s based on fact, not pure fiction). But very well written, like all O’Brian’s books.
Looking for a replacement for my missing HMS Surprise, I see that the ghouls at WW Norton have published the first three chapters of the last book O’Brian was writing before his death. I’m torn whether I should get it too. I really need to rejoin the Gunroom and ask the opinion of the denizens there, but I really don’t have time to keep up with the flood of mail right now.
The most Austinesque of the series. Perhaps the best.
Unfortunately, I can’t locate the next book, HMS Surprise, which is a pity, as it’s my favourite.
I’m re-reading the Aubrey-Maturin series, also known as the Canon.
Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland.
This is Coupland’s second novel, and the first by him that I read, back in the day, when the Nineties were young (it’s written in 1992). I don’t think I’ve read Generation X in the original.
Like all Coupland’s early novels, this is an amusing read.
Quick work was done of the following works this long weekend.
Newton’s Wake, by Ken Macleod.
Classic space opera. Less well-plotted than the author’s other novels. This feels more of a collection of cool ideas and scenarios (how do you get an artifact off a planet that’s smack-dab in the output of a pulsar?) than a real novel. MacLeod’s trademark politics is not really to be seen.
Ares Express, by Ian MacDonald.
Set in the same universe as the Hundred Years of Solitude pastiche Desolation Road, this is more of the same Martian future — anarchist, caste-ridden, and filled with BIG trains. A nice read if you don’t have to pay for it.
Zeitgeist, by Bruce Sterling.
A re-read. An extended riff on pop music and the seamy underbelly of the last days of the twentieth century. Rather light-weight, but filled with Sterling’s trademark zany descriptions. No characters actually exist, as they all talk in exactly the same way. That is, like Sterling himself.
Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis.
The first part of Lewis’ “Space Trilogy”. Interesting read. I may be older, but the religious themes are stronger here than in the Narnia books. Nice demolishment of a pro-coloniast straw man in the final chapters.
A Discworld novel.
The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: a Trilogy in Five Parts, by Douglas Adams.
Some books simply don’t age along with you. When I first read the first two books in the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide series in high school, they were the funniest books I’ve ever read (even in Swedish translation, which is excellent). Now, however, the lustre is gone.
Also, the last novel (Mostly Harmless) ends very strangely. Lots of loose ends…
I re-read this to freshen my memory of the books in anticipation of the upcoming movie. I think that it the movie is “Terry-Gilliamised” — I could totally see a movie in the same vein as Time Bandits — it should be a huge success. There’s a lot of action in the books, and you can get a pretty good movie by boiling them down to an hour-and-a-half of script.
Oh, and I finally grokked the meaning of SubEthaEdit…
The Haunted Wood, by Allen Weinstein.
A rather dry, factual account of Soviet espionage in the US around the Second World War.
Many interesting stories, presented in a workmanlike style. Spying as a not very exciting vocation. Non-judgemental, though. The Soviet operatives were just doing their jobs, so to speak. But the price paid by the agents was sometimes very heavy.
The Minority Report and other stories, by Philip K. Dick.
Dick is perhaps the only pulp-era SF writer who’s been absorbed by the US academe. These stories are short and rather political, with plenty of Cold War paranoia and nuclear holocaust angst to fuel them.
Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland.
I read this book in about 24 hours, a very enjoyable read. Like William Gibson’s, Coupland’s prose is fluid and nearly frictionless, and he relies on this property to slip the reader effortlessly through plots that are thin and rather silly.
Like Microserfs, Miss Wyoming offers glimpses into the incubators of popular culture — in this case: Hollywood. But unlike his depiction of hackers in love, his LA cast seems cardboard-like. The central protagonist’s history of drug and sex abuse are alluded to, but seem tacked on, not part of his character at all. And the eponymous Miss Wyoming is a blank slate, an impossibly naif ex-beauty queen who’s words of wisdom are not hers at all, but transparently the author’s.
Enjoyable read, none the less.
The Last Grain Race, by Eric Newby.
18-year old Eric Newby signs on as an apprentice on the barque Moshulu in 1938, bound for Australia for grain. His middle-class background contrasts with the Finns and Ålanders serving alongside him in the fo’csle of this last example of a sailing merchant ship. With humour and warmth he tells the tale of sailing round Africa to Australia and back via Cape Horn.
A great read, like all books by Newby.
The Pragmatic Programmer by A. Hunt and D. Thomas.
There’s a lot to like about this book. The authors advocate a pragmatic approach to developing software: use what works. Don’t get bogged down in methodologies, communicate effectively, test ruthlessly.
The edition I read was pretty Unix-centric, which is fine by me. But if you’re working in a MS environment you might be forgiven for being mystified by Makefiles and Emacs.
I myself enjoy using Emacs for day-to-day editing, but I think a well-designed IDE can leverage a language in way that a text editor cannot. MS Visual Studio.NET was very nice, and the authors talk a lot about the browsers available in the Smalltalk world. There are advantages in both approaches. I’d rather write documentation in Emacs than in Word, for example.
I’ve been inspired to use a few of the principles expounded in the book in this very weblog. For example:
The DRY principle (“Don’t repeat yourself). Earlier I had a list of links in the sidebar that was duplicated in my Bloglines setup. So I wrote a script that fetches my blogroll from Bloglines and puts it in its own post. Now I only have to maintain my blog links in one place. The same principle applies to my reading list and the data of what I’ve listened to on Audioscrobbler.
Decoupling. I’m trying to keep the internal links of this weblog consistent and decoupled from the current implementation (i.e., that it’s situated on http://gustaf.symbiandiaries.com/weblog. That way I can set it up somewhere else with little or no effort. (This is in no way a vote of non-confidence in the allaboutsymbian.com team who very generously let me have some space on their server. It’s just that I’m planning on getting my own server sometime and I want to be prepared for that eventuality.)
The New York Review of Books, vol. LI.
The NYRB is always interesting. I usually find two or three articles that are worth reading, but I try to slog through all of them. As it’s my father’s subscription, I usually read two or three when I visit my parent’s. After Christmas I grabbed all the issues for 2004, and I’ve been reading them since then.
Reading a whole volume does get a little tedious, however. The paper is pretty topical, so there was a lot of election coverage. Some things, like Abu Graib or Michael Massig’s indictment of the American press on their toadying coverage of Bush’s casus belli retain their topicality still. Others feel more dated.
I’ve added some books to the reading list based on the reviews.
The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod (re-read).
The final installment of McLeod’s series of books about the fall and rise of a socialist-anarchist society.
Possibly the weakest of the four, but enjoyable none the less.
Update: Ken MacLeod has a blog. The things you find when you putz around the ‘Net…
Imperium, by Ryszard Kapuscinski.
A travel writer mostly known for his writings on the Third World, Kapuscinski tells us about his encounters with the Imperium — Russia, first in its Czarist incarnation, then as the Soviet Union, and lastly stumbling towards a new system, which seems unlikely to be democracy in the Western sense.
From the harrowing account of his childhood in Soviet-occupied Poland, to the recollections of camp inmates in Magadan and the tragedy of Armenia, Kapuscinski paints a bleak picture of a great country plundered and murdered by generations of ruthless rulers.
This passage sums up the Soviet period. A batch of deportees has arrived in Magadan after a freezing sea voyage. They are counted, slowly, by illiterate guards:
The half-naked deportees stood motionless in a blizzard, lashed by the gales. Finally, the escorts delivered their routine admonition: A step to the left or a step to the right is considered an escape attempt — we shoot without warning! This identical formula was uniformly applied throughout the entire territory of the USSR. The whole nation, two hundred million strong, had to march in tight formation in a dictated direction. Any deviation to the left or the right meant death.
A democratic future in Russia seems unlikely:
The Russian land, its characteristics and resources, favor the power of the state. The soil of native Russia is poor, the climate cold, the day, for the greater part of the year, short. Under such natural conditions, the earth yields meager harvests, there is recurrent famine, the peasant is poor, too poor to become independent. The master or the state has always had enormous power over him. The peasant, drowning in debt, has nothing to eat, is a slave.
On the future:
And yet this country’s future can be seen optimistically. Large societies have great internal strength. They have sufficient vital energy and inexhaustible supplies of all kinds of power so as to be able to raise themselves up from the most grievous setbacks and emerge from the most serious crises.
Update: Just saw a TV programme about Kapuscinski, A Poet of the Frontline. So now I’m adding The Emperor to my reading list.
Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda by John Keegan.
A series of case studies on the use of intelligence in warfare. Mostly centered around WW2. The Al-Qaeda reference seems a later add-on to boost sales.
Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett.
A Discworld novel. ‘Nuff said.
Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age by Margot A. Henriksen.
A sort of cultural history of the Cold War. Through dissections of popular films and books, especially Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Henriksen exposes the corrosive effects of nuclear weapons on American morals and society.
Heavy Weather by Bruce Sterling.
Re-read this for the nth time. The prose and ideas are top-notch, but the story isn’t really up to scratch.
Update: could Katrina mark the start of this particular future?